When the artificial grass on the football grounds was replaced with real grass for the 2026 FIFA World Cup, it raised a debate on NFL player safety. Las Vegas Raiders owner Mark Davis is one of the standouts actively advocating for mandating real grass across all league stadiums. And now, as it seems, another franchise owner has joined him.

Last month, Billionaire entrepreneur Vinod Khosla and his family entered into a formal agreement with the Paul G. Allen Estate to buy the Seattle Seahawks for a record-breaking $9.612 billion. Following the acquisition, Khosla recently quipped in response to a netizen’s question about using real grass at the Lumen Field.

“I’d defer to people at the @seahawks who know better than me. The team that got us the Super Bowl,” Khosla wrote on X.

The Seattle Seahawks players have advocated using a natural grass field over the turf on multiple occassions.

“It makes a huge difference,” Cooper Kupp said in an yearly survey run by the NFL Players Association. “I know all the metrics and all the data that say the injury rates of this, but I don’t know. I know how I feel. You ask a lot of players who will say the same thing. Whether injury rates change or not, I know how my body feels, everything on turf versus grass. You can ask coaches how their backs feel after standing on the turf versus grass. Coaches have a lot of other issues. But it does make a difference.” 

Meanwhile, Leonard Williams, who was a part of the team’s Super Bowl LX winning roster also echoed a similar sentiment.

“I understand there’s a lot of things that go into having grass in the stadium that I don’t fully understand yet, but if it was up to a player and it just came down to grass or turf, we obviously prefer grass.”

Vinod Khosla’s statement showcased intention, but when he will act on that support shown towards Mark Davis remains unclear. Davis himself has instilled a dual field system at the Allegiant Stadium where real grass is rolled in for NFL games and artificial turf stays inside the building on the concrete floor for other events.

While other owners treat artificial playing surfaces as financial assets optimized for cost efficiency and entertainment revenue, Davis views a natural grass field as a requirement for player safety.

“I just always felt that football should be played on grass,” Davis told the Los Angeles Times last month. “That’s for safety purposes, No. 1. I want it to look like a game was played even if it’s an indoor field. You see grass stains and everything else. I wasn’t going to a stadium without it being grass once I knew that capability was there. Obviously, it added a lot of cost, but it’s worth it.”

Data compiled by the NFLPA (2012-2018) revealed that players on artificial turf suffer at least a 69% higher rate of non-contact ankle or foot injuries compared to grass. However, according to the NFL Field Director, Nick Pappas, the injury rate on both surfaces is identical.

“When we look across injury data, we no longer see this as an injury issue,” Pappas said on The Dan Patrick Show. “When we look at the injury rate and the severity of injury — and by that I mean the amount of ACLs, the amount of extended time-loss injuries, those real burdensome injuries, when we look at that, it’s a split, grass vs. turf. It becomes just the injury rate of playing football at this point.”

The debate hinges on whether safety data or cost concerns will drive league policy. But it will be interesting to see whether the situation changes if more NFL owners like Vinod Khosla join Mark Davis in mandating real grass in every football stadium.